


Bring Us Goodness and Light

by voodoochild



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: CM: familyverse, Gen, Kid Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-09
Updated: 2010-03-09
Packaged: 2017-10-07 20:29:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/68942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voodoochild/pseuds/voodoochild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Christmas and David Rossi do not mix under any circumstances. Then the Hotchner clan comes along. This is how Dave Rossi becomes "Dad".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bring Us Goodness and Light

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place in melliyna's kidverse, where the BAU is an actual family. She's letting me play in her sandbox, her birthday is soonish, and god knows this fandom needs some cheering-up after "100". This story is for her. The title and bit of quoted song is from the Christmas carol "Do You Hear What I Hear?"

Dave knew his first Christmas with Aaron and the kids would be different; the lesson, though, was exactly how different.

After all, you can hardly tell a five-year-old "no, sweetie, I don't like Christmas because of a twenty-year-old murder case where I found two bodies butchered by a Christmas tree ax". So when Penelope asked – curled up in his lap, in the middle of the sixth consecutive rereading of _Harold and the Purple Crayon_ – he just had to sigh and tell her "I don't know. I guess I never had a real Christmas. I just never liked it."

The news had spread throughout the house within a day, and that Saturday, while Aaron took Spencer and Pen to the playground, Dave found himself cornered in the kitchen by JJ, Emily, and Derek, who clambered onto the stools at the counter and refused to let him continue making dinner until he talked to them.

"Why don't you like Christmas, Dave?" Emily asked.

He was "Dave" then, he and Aaron had agreed that it was for the best, because Jason Gideon was still, legally, "Dad", and it would confuse the younger kids.

"You get to wake up and open lots of presents and watch the Disney parade and then eat a big dinner," JJ said, in bafflement. "How can you not like that?"

He shrugged, hoping that if he just continued chopping vegetables for the soup and stirring the saucepan, they'd leave him alone. Fat chance.

Derek marched around the counter and stood toe-to-toe with him, hands on his hips; an Aaron pose if he ever saw one. That was Aaron's cross-examination stance, and all the kids knew it meant business.

"You're doing the Christmas thing, Dave," he said. "Tree, presents, dinner, and carols. You're going to Pen's dance recital and Emily's concert, too. Pop won't admit it, but he loves Christmas, and this is the first one without – without him."

None of the kids will say Gideon's name, but they don't need to. Everyone knows the elephant in the room.

Dave had to raise an eyebrow at Derek, though. "I am, am I?"

Derek got that look in his eyes – another Aaron inheritance – that said _'I will argue you into next week, don't think I won't'_. It's surprisingly effective, even coming from a gangly twelve-year-old trying to ignore his first pimples. But it was Emily who answered, leaning over the counter and stealing a celery stick.

"You are. This Christmas has to be perfect, for Pop and Spence and Pen. And if it's not, you've got us to deal with."

Emily's ten going on forty-five, he swears to God. She's terrifying, when she wants to be, and she's got Derek on her left and JJ on her right mimicking the same stubborn look she's giving him.

At the time, he'd just placated them with promises (_"all right, I'll do my best"_) and distracted them with other things (_"Derek, did you bring the laundry up from the basement?" "JJ, your Pop's told you a hundred times, no soccer in the house!" "Em, turn the TV down, okay? The neighbors don't need to hear Charlie Brown Christmas again"_), not really intending to do anything different than what he'd done for the past twenty years.

Quiet night, a call to his mom in Jersey and one to his sister in Philly, and a check for $500 to the Galen kids.

That's exactly what he's going to do, and he honestly expects nothing different.

~*~*~*~

It just sneaks right up on him.

Little things, like Spencer insisting that he has to be the one to put all the decorations on the very top of the tree. It's at least seven feet – Derek had ducked his head sheepishly when he and Aaron brought it home from the lot and Dave had asked how they were going to fit it in the door. Aaron just gave him that Look of his (_"do not argue with me on this, you will lose"_) and passed him an armful of Pen before she could climb any further into the branches looking for fairies. The tree is inside, though, and Spencer has decided Dave is his own personal forklift for decorating. Spencer parked himself on Dave's shoulders and was gleefully demanding "next!" as he hung the ornaments one on top of another and Dave and Aaron discreetly spaced them out.

Like going to Pen's dance recital – and he's listened to "Waltz of the Sugar Plum Fairy" at least a hundred times at home while she leaps and twirls around her room, but damn it if he's not right in the second row with the rest of the family, taking pictures with a disposable camera. Pen's fairly hard to miss; she's the only kid with purple glasses, a missing tooth, at least six different hair bows, and rainbows drawn all over her ballet shoes. Pen insists on riding home afterward with him and Derek – Aaron takes the other three in his car - and makes him put on the Nutcracker soundtrack on the drive home while she chirps happily about how she's going to be the Sugar Plum Fairy when she grows up and Derek's going to be her Prince.

Like JJ and Derek worming their way into making cookies with him a week before Christmas. It was the one thing he'd actually liked about the holiday, and his mother's cherry-and-cream-cheese cookie recipe is still as good as ever. JJ had gotten flour all over herself and Derek somehow managed to get butter on the ceiling _and_ the floor, but they made five batches (chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, cream cheese, sugar, and double chocolate) and had enough flour left over for one batch of pizzelles, which, luckily enough, none of the kids would touch and Dave could eat in peace. JJ's also decided she's going to be a baker when she grows up – last week, it was a pilot, then an astronaut, then a soccer-playing princess – so, at the very least, _someone_ appreciates his culinary tutelage.

He's convinced himself that nothing is really out of the ordinary, but then Emily shows up one night at the door to his and Aaron's room, sniffling and pretending she hasn't just been crying. Aaron's doing his usual goodnight songs with Spencer and Pen, and Dave's going through case notes. Five days to Christmas, but he has to fly out to Omaha tomorrow on a consult. He's brusque with her; he doesn't mean to be, but he's trying to gather the files into a folder so she doesn't see the vivisected corpses and blood spatter patterns.

"C'mon, Em," he says, as she shifts from foot to foot. "We talked about knocking when I'm working on a case."

Emily hesitates at the door until he puts the case files into his bag, then runs across the room and does a flying leap onto the bed. She burrows into his side, hiccuping and sobbing something about how she's ruined Christmas and Aaron's going to hate her.

Dave is still, after seven months, not used to this part of parenting.

~*~*~*~

It's twenty minutes of awkward hair-stroking and shoulder-rubbing, but she calms down enough to tell him what's wrong. She has a choir concert on the 23rd – which he knows, it's on the calendar and he'll be coming straight from the airport – and she'd gotten a solo. Dave isn't sure why this is cause for hysterical sobbing until she tells him that it's "Do You Hear What I Hear?".

Gideon's favorite song. He'd sung it every year on Christmas, taught it to all the kids. Even Spencer knows the tune. It'll remind Aaron and the rest of the family that Jason's gone, and Emily knows they try not to do that, so she hasn't practiced in the house and she's going to sound terrible, she just knows it, and why did Daddy have to leave, Dave?

Oh boy. This is not the part of parenting he'd signed up for. Not that he'd actually known what he was signing up for, mind you, but he'd looked Aaron in the eyes after Jason left and promised he'd be there for him and the kids.

Dave doesn't break his promises.

He gets his coat on, bundles Emily up in her winter jacket, scarf, and mittens, and tells Aaron he's taking a run to the store. Aaron says he doesn't need anything, but to not let Emily get Bubble Tape again unless he wants to clean it off her hair when she pops a bubble the size of her head. They drive into DC, to Saint Jerome's, where his buddy Jimmy is the pastor, and Jimmy claps him on the shoulder knowingly, lets Emily look into the confessional and ask him about the stained-glass windows, and tells them they can have the empty choir room for as long as they need.

Dave has never heard Emily sing before this - not seriously, just accompanying Aaron on "Mr. Tambourine Man" for Spencer once and singing along to Mary Poppins with JJ. She makes him face the wall (_"Da-ave! I can't sing if you're watching!" "What are you going to do at the concert, then?" "That's different! There'll be lots more people and I won't know where you are."_) and starts up the melody for "Do You Hear What I Hear?". She's got a pure mezzo, not high or sweet, but clear, and while she stumbles over the timing the first couple times, she nails it soon after.

She falls asleep in the car on the ride home, knees tucked to her chest, hair rising and falling with each breath from where it's covered her face. He unbuckles her seatbelt and lifts her up, her arms going around his neck sleepily, and goes inside as quietly as he can.

It's not too late – Derek's light is still on, and he's playing Madden on his Xbox – but Spencer and Pen and JJ are all in bed. He tucks Emily into the top bunk, retrieving Mister Pinky, Emily's stuffed rabbit, from where he's fallen under JJ's bed, and takes Pen's glasses off after she's insisted on sleeping with them on again. Then Pen wakes up and demands her usual story, and it's round seven of _Harold and the Purple Crayon_ before he can get her settled back down.

~*~*~*~

Aaron asks where they've been later, when the house is quiet and it's just he and Dave sitting at the kitchen table in pajamas, sharing a bottle of scotch and some leftover pizza from dinner. Dave tells him that it was nothing, they just got sidetracked at the toy store and ended up buying a Star Wars Lego set for Derek. This is technically true – he _did_ buy Derek a Lego set – but Aaron knows him well enough to know it's also a lie, and he's a little angry.

Dave understands, it's hard to be trusting when, the last time your partner was lying to you, he had a psychotic break and ran off for parts unknown. He knows Aaron is trying not to be suspicious, trying to believe him, but it's just natural to be suspicious in his line of work and he doesn't want to be lied to again.

So Dave tells Aaron part of the truth; Emily was worried about her choir solo and didn't want to sing in the house even though she's done choir every year since she was five. Aaron shakes his head, because that's Emily for you, and rounds the table to put his arms around Dave and kiss him on the back of the neck before he goes up to bed.

The Omaha trip is both mercifully short and devoid of any body count besides the original four victims, and he's back in time to catch Derek's basketball game the afternoon before Emily's concert. Derek's team wins, so they go out to Wendy's before the concert (not McDonald's, because Spencer will get lost in the ball pit and not Burger King, because both JJ and Dave hate their fries).

Emily is refusing to drink anything but water or eat more than two bites of food, nervous before the concert as usual. Spencer is in one of his weird food phases – this time, it's a no-bread phase – so he's alternately dunking his bun-less burger in ketchup and mustard and stealing JJ's fries, because they're "yummy" and apparently completely different from the identical ones on his tray. Pen is coloring on the placemats and Derek and Aaron are talking about last night's Capitals game, and Dave wonders when the hell this became something like the perfect life.

The auditorium at Emily's (and Derek's, and JJ's) school is decorated for Christmas, almost as much as the exploded-party-store look they've got going on back at home. Emily runs off in her red blouse and black skirt, jingle bell hat on, and JJ sees one of her friends and drags the girl over, parents in tow. They go through the whole "yes, JJ has two dads; no, neither of us is her biological father; no, we don't believe in religion; no, none of our kids are biologically related; yes, we're very happy with such a big family" schtick, and it's almost getting to be second nature. Dave has to take Spencer out for some air a couple times because he's nervous around all the unfamiliar people, and Derek accidentally kicks Pen's chair too hard and starts her crying – and when Pen cries, the entire _neighborhood_ will hear it – but luckily, nothing else happens.

Well, other than Emily's teacher cornering Aaron and attempting to convince him that this whole "homosexual phase" should really have run its course. It's fun watching Aaron squirm, but Dave takes pity on him and distracts Miss Farrell by asking about Emily's latest math test. Aaron shoots him a grateful look and escapes, leaving Dave to hear again how Emily won't focus in math and how she didn't even finish the test. Dave doesn't blame her – he hated math when he was her age – but he convinces Miss Farrell that they'll look into getting her tutoring help.

The concert is cute, a mini-pageant of kids dressed as candy canes and gift boxes and snowflakes singing familiar songs tunelessly (not that Dave can throw stones, his voice is pretty terrible), and then the choir comes on, last part of the show. There are other kids who have solos – among them a boy doing "Up on the Housetop" who forgets the words and two girls dueting on "All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth" getting involved in a slapfight - but in Dave's unashamedly biased opinion, Emily's going to blow them all away.

There's a tense moment when she first walks to the microphone, having to adjust it because she's a foot shorter than the last boy who sang. She freezes, looking out at the audience and seeing the family there. But then she looks at Dave, closes her eyes, and starts up: _"Said the night wind to the little lamb, do you see what I see?"_

No one notices, but Aaron's hand creeps behind JJ to clasp Dave's. He looks over to find Aaron blinking back tears, but smiling. Aaron whispers "you knew", and Dave reluctantly nods.

"Emily told me."

"It's okay," Aaron says, and squeezes his hand. "You're here."

Dave isn't going anywhere.

~*~*~*~

Christmas morning comes in a far-too-early chorus of shrieks of "POP! DAVE! CAN WE OPEN PRESENTS? PLEASEPLEASEPLEASE?" and five kids using their bed as a trampoline.

Dave considers the merits of rolling over and going back to sleep, but Aaron grabs him by the pajama collar and says "if I have to be up at six-thirty, so do you" and so it's probably a good plan to get out of bed. Tackling five kids and Christmas morning chaos is hard enough when you've been up until 1:30 am wrapping presents, policing to make sure Pen doesn't try to "catch" Santa again, and making a last-minute run for the store to buy an extra stocking so Emily and JJ don't have the same color. At the very least, he and Aaron can combat the exhaustion together.

This is new, the whole stumbling-downstairs and sitting on the floor near the tree. He hasn't done this since he was a kid himself, and it's strange at first. But then Aaron hands him a mug of coffee – Aaron's only a halfway-decent cook, but he makes the best coffee Dave's ever had – and Derek and Emily tear at the first of the presents, and it's like he's been doing this all their lives. There's wrapping paper everywhere and all the kids are already playing with their new toys.

JJ dents the closet door with her new lacrosse stick, and Pen has commandeered Emily's scarf and Derek's boots to play dress-up for a tea party with her new dolls. Spencer refuses to let go of the light-up toy keyboard he's got, and Emily and Derek have broken out the Lego playset already. They foist presents on Dave and Aaron – and Dave will never ever tell anyone that Pen's ballet-inspired collage for him is going straight on his desk, and that Derek's book on Creole cooking is pretty much exactly what he was going to buy himself. Aaron relaxes his rules on playing video games during the day and challenges Derek and JJ to a game of Guitar Hero while Spencer watches (he's fascinated by the colors and sounds, he'll sit there for hours if you let him) and Emily, Pen, and Dave cheer and occasionally heckle.

There's breakfast – Dave's doing, once he's woken up properly, though Emily and JJ help with the French toast and Derek pours juice – and piling on the couch to watch the Disney parade (discovering in the process that Spencer is deathly afraid of Goofy). There's playing all day and lazing around in pajamas, which Emily thinks is the most fun idea ever and swears she's never getting dressed again. This only lasts for an hour, luckily. The afternoon is mostly dinner preparations, which Dave's memorized to make sure he gets it right (because seriously, cooking roast chicken and three sides, along with hot dogs for Spencer and spaghetti for Pen, is a time-consuming effort without keeping an eye on five kids). JJ drops one of the bowls and Spencer decides he wants spaghetti too, but other than that, it goes off pretty well.

He calls his mom up in Cherry Hill. He's caught the entire family – Mom, her "companion" Dominic, Tina and the boys, Anthony's new girlfriend and her sister and parents, his uncle Peter and aunt Lillian, their two kids – and they pass the phone around. He doesn't talk to them often, but it's good catching up. Mom, of course, orders him to put Aaron on the phone and spends a good ten minutes exhorting him to "bring my David and those kids up here one weekend, I want to spoil them rotten", and after hearing they've got "cousins" in New Jersey, JJ and Pen want to know when they're going to visit and get more presents.

All these little things that Dave had thought he'd lost.

He doesn't even hate when Spencer starts demanding Christmas carols, though he leaves most of the singing of said carols to everyone else. Pen's alternate lyrics to "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" are hilarious (no one's going to tell her that "rhino" and "wino" aren't the same thing), and Derek surprises everyone by breaking into "The First Noel" (which he picked up in his foster home in Calumet City that he usually never talks about), and JJ and Emily twirl Spencer around to "Jingle Bell Rock". Derek picks Pen up and starts waltzing with her, and Aaron settles next to Dave on the couch, watching the kids – their kids – having fun and butchering the lyrics to "Little Drummer Boy".

"Think you might want to try this again next year?" Aaron asks.

Dave laughs. "Only if we agree on a no-presents-before-seven-am rule. I can deal with the rest, but I don't function before seven in the morning, no matter what day it is."

"Deal," Aaron says, before leaning in and kissing him.

This gets the predictable reaction of teasing and mock disgust from the kids, but it's what Spencer says that has both he and Aaron surprised.

"Ew! Papa! Dad! Stop it!"

Dad? Dave isn't sure about that, but thinks he can get used to being a parent.


End file.
